Surge Strategy Borrows From Bush Argument
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration, faced with mounting Congressional criticism, is trying to build support for its new Afghan strategy by explicitly linking the planned escalation to the Bush administration's 2007 Iraq surge.
The argument has been pressed most vocally by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who told skeptical lawmakers Thursday that the surge troops were able to leave Iraq just over a year after they had deployed there, a timeline roughly akin to the one the White House now envisions in Afghanistan.
"It will be similar to the gradual but steady, conditions-based drawdown that began to take place in Iraq about 14 months after the surge began," Mr. Gates, a Bush administration holdover who presided over the Iraq surge, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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The argument has been pressed most vocally by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who told skeptical lawmakers Thursday that the surge troops were able to leave Iraq just over a year after they had deployed there, a timeline roughly akin to the one the White House now envisions in Afghanistan.
"It will be similar to the gradual but steady, conditions-based drawdown that began to take place in Iraq about 14 months after the surge began," Mr. Gates, a Bush administration holdover who presided over the Iraq surge, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.